A Surreal and Outrageous World: Jessica Anthony in Conversation with Joshua Ferris

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Jessica Anthony’s surreal and outrageous Enter the Aardvark published on March 24 into a surreal and outrageous world. In the months leading up to publication, the novel saw an outpouring of love from indie booksellers, and Anthony had a tour planned with events in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Houston, and Denver, among other cities. She was particularly looking forward to a night at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore, where she would have been joined in conversation by Joshua Ferris, a novelist she has long admired. It was an ideal pairing: Both Ferris and Anthony take aim at the absurdities of modern life in their work, walking the line between satire and soul and managing to be wickedly funny and greathearted at once. Luckily for readers, not even a pandemic could stop their conversation.

Ferris has said that Enter the Aardvark “estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable.” Now, as the state of the world gets more deplorable every day, Anthony and Ferris aim to make it a little more bearable with this discussion of the exit of reason, Venetian dolphins, horses who eat cars, and how to resist the temptation to opt out of the world.

Joshua Ferris: Hello, Jessica. I’ve been so excited for such a long time now to speak to you in person and get to know the mind behind your new novel, Enter the Aardvark. Alas, the coronavirus came along and dashed our plans.

Jessica Anthony: The virus is a mega-dasher, unlike any we have seen before. It was a strange and peculiar thing to watch the book tour fall away after spending years writing and editing the novel. It sort of felt like being 10 feet from the finish line of a five-year-long marathon and then getting tackled by a linebacker who appears out of nowhere. (First football analogy I have ever used.) I’m sure we are all swapping virus stories, but mine began March 3. I was planning on going to AWP when the mayor of San Antonio declared the city was in a state of emergency, and I was torn about attending. Back then—you know, three weeks ago—there was still quite a bit of uncertainty about the degree to which the virus would be a problem in the States. (This was just two days before Trump was saying he would prefer the souls on the Grand Princess cruise simply stay put to prevent “rising numbers” that would fuck with the stock market, and then lying about the availability of testing.) So I made the call not to go. Ten days later, the college where I teach was closed, and my book tour evaporated.

Josh, I was so looking forward to meeting you in person, as I’ve devoured your novels for years. Missing out on our conversation at Greenlight Bookstore was honestly one of the biggest disappointments for me. But at this point, where we are now, with everyone talking online (two days after Trump offered up the true character of whatever we might call the “Trump Doctrine:” “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”)—well, I’m just feeling grateful waking up every day that the people closest to me have so far eluded this awful thing, looking for ways to help, glad that the Internet seems to be finally showing its fullest use and purpose. A virtual book tour didn’t exist last month, and now everyone’s doing them. My first event, we had 100 people join from all over the country…it was actually a pretty extraordinary, novel experience.

JF: Your novel involves a stuffed aardvark, a closeted Victorian-era naturalist and his taxidermist lover, the ghost of that naturalist, his widow, and, in a completely different timeline, the deeply closeted Republican Congressman and Reagan acolyte Alexander Paine Wilson who, once gifted the stuffed aardvark, sees everything around him crumble.

But before we get to all that, I hope I can convince you to do me a favor. One of my favorite things about your book is your expert capacity to reduce enormous amounts of cosmic time into a succinct paragraph or two that appears to explain the aardvark, or the eyeball, or really whatever your imagination alights upon. Can I get you to summarize the current state of the world vis-a-vis the coronavirus with a brief Anthonian paragraph that includes the phrase “Enter the virus”?

JA: Enter the virus, exit any plans you had for, oh, like, the next six months. Exit intimacy. Exit the toilet paper and watch your lazy, spray-tanned president assure the People that everything is going to be okay, that “anyone who wants a test can get a test,” while, like, Fox News cries out hoax, while senators Burr, Loeffler, et al secretly sell their stock, buy into telecommunications, and Tom Hanks gets it, Rand Paul votes against fighting it and then gets it, and as countries shut down, one-by-one, read an article in the Times warning us that like, more of us will die if we don’t worry about our dollars, watch Steve Martin play the banjo, and when the Fed coughs up an answer: the “money-printing presses are fired up and ready to go!” exit reason, you think, and remember that reason is like, totally gone. The very notion of Reason, it exited a long time ago…

JF: Excellent. You really do have this remarkable ability in the book to synthesize enormous amounts of factual information while keeping everything brisk and entertaining. Where does that impulse come from? Have you seen something similar in other writers?

JA: I could ask you a similar question! Voice. I started out writing poems. I was trained to write syllabically. I hear a sound in contemporary tech-speak as I do in contemporary political speech and in, like, Millennial speech. I suppose I want to read a voice that speaks language the way that I hear language, which means sometimes hearing “multitudinous seas incarnadine” and sometimes “I put my thing down/Flip it/And reverse it.” I want language in a novel to be egalitarian. Mostly though, the pace and sound happened naturally when I realized that I would be writing a novel that would happen over the course of two days. In less than two days, a gigantic taxidermied aardvark would somehow completely ruin a politician’s career. The voice had to be fast, and reflect in some way the speed of Alex’s indictment, which is hastened by his own vanity, blindness—but also by our very modern thirst for “cancelling” human beings out of our public spaces. So what has stunned me, too, about this virus, is how it’s forced us all to stop. There’s barely any traffic. The skies are clearing. People are being charitable to one another, at least so far. As my friend Deb Olin Unferth pointed out: dolphins are swimming again in the canals of Venice. The pace of Enter the Aardvark speaks to the moment just before this, when we were all just always moving, and now that we’ve stopped, it’s really a shock to the system. In some ways, then, the pace is a kind of warning. We are all rushing, not looking, and living in a time when our systems and leaders cannot be trusted to safely guide us. Everything is risky. Which is all to say that I want fiction to pay attention the way that I have to pay attention. To do otherwise feels like a lie.

JF: The aardvark, after a valiant battle, loses her life to an African hunter, is shipped to England, stuffed, displayed and sold, travels to Germany and then to America where it prompts a political scandal, and from there is finally restored to its—but no spoilers here. Tell us a little more about this aardvark—aardvark-as-invention, aardvark-as-plot-device.

JA: The aardvarks, with their long ears, tubular snouts, thick tails, are creatures that sort of look like they defy reason. They appear marvelous, in the surrealist sense, and are one of the oldest, most “evolutionarily distinctive” mammals on earth. I began imagining a kind of tension between these two irrational-seeming characters who both occur in nature, and have not evolved: the ancient aardvark and the modern-day politician. To “enter the aardvark” (a phrase which is recontextualized several times in the novel) meant that literally, yes, a gigantic taxidermied aardvark would enter a millennial congressman’s life, setting into motion a series of chaotic events that would hasten a spectacularly fast downfall—but it also meant entering into a hyperbolized 21st-century state of mind; one which has evolved in response to a distinct set of circumstances which ask us to ignore or repress our innermost desires in preference for a constant state of image-making. I am reminded of a Grace Paley quote from her speech in 1982 about the global movement for women’s equality: “We are in the hands of men whose power and wealth have separated them from the reality of daily life and from the imagination. We are right to be afraid.” The aardvark—irrational, everlasting—emerged as the symbol of the perfect political hypocrite in a time of rampant hypocrisy. There is the donkey, the elephant. And then there are aardvarks.

The aardvark in the novel exists very much on her own terms as a living being, then as an object of Titus Downing—the taxidermist’s—affection, then as a perverse prize, then as a totem of hope. One of the founders of Surrealism, poet and novelist Andre Breton, believed in the “convulsive” beauty of objects, which can only occur by “affirming the reciprocal relations” between an object in motion and the object at the moment of the “expiration” of that motion. The aardvark both moves and is expired in the novel, at which point it moves again, but differently; just as the phrase “enter the aardvark” is recontextualized in the telling, so is the way in which the stuffed aardvark—now an expired object—situates itself, disturbing Alex.

Why? Because the aardvark, once stuffed, is a work of imagination. For a guy like Alex, who rides on vanity and privilege, and who never had much use for his imagination, the bizarre aardvark is, among many other things, a terrifying reminder to him of everything that he is not.

JF: Wilson is a familiar figure from our current crop of congressional Republican scum-a-dumbs. Yet he is not totally devoid of a moment or two in which he nearly ekes out from the feeling reader a half-drop of pity. Was that inevitable, or did you have to work hard to arrive there?

JA: The question of who is more vulnerable, who is more deserving of our empathic focus, Alex or those he oppresses, gets right at the heart of Enter the Aardvark. I was interested in writing a character I haven’t seen—a politician at the mercy of his own politics. What makes room for us to feel something, maybe, for Alex Wilson is the fact that he simply doesn’t believe in, or even remotely care about, what he votes for. And he doesn’t think about why it matters that he does or doesn’t believe it. For example, early in the novel, being anti-abortion is named as a key part of his “platform,” but Alex has never once imagined an abortion, and doesn’t actually care about it in the exact way that he does not believe in God, but will say he does “to appease evangelicals.” So here was a man, I realized, who unthinkingly embraces policies that hurt so many people simply because even having to think about voting otherwise would be…politically inconvenient. (Of course, these “inconveniences” are hurting him, but to see himself honestly would be antithetical to his political goals.)

Ironically, his lack of belief in it all, his nihilism, if you can call it that, made him more human to me than if he actively hated other people to the extremes we see from the GOP nowadays. His racism, sexism, intolerance…it feels rote. Extremely immature. His attitude of disregarding or disparaging others who aren’t immediately useful to him as a politician? That way of living in the world—opting out—is a danger for all of us, and is frankly something I’ve seen widely in the United States, not just in Alex, which is maybe where the half-drop of pity appears. And of course we also know, even if Alex doesn’t, that he identifies with a political party that does not support his sexual preference. It’s one of the many subterranean cruelties running through the novel that had to force itself to the front of his consciousness—or closer to the front of his consciousness—by the end.

JF: Enter the Aardvark is slyly didactic, especially toward the end, when dumb-ass Wilson repeats Reagan’s dumb-ass disparagement of government assistance (“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”), eliciting strong accusations of hypocrisy from the women in the room. Yet this book is entirely too delightful to be dictated by white-hot rage alone. What was the operating mix?

JA: The women existed in the margins at first, but they eventually revealed themselves to be the novel’s moral agents and directors. I love the women in the novel (or, I should say, most of them). The women are largely in defiance of Alex’s scorn and derision, and they are the only people who stand to reveal to Alex the severity of his hypocrisy. They also act as his lone opportunity for redemption. Of course, he can’t realize that he is the same kind of American citizen as these women; that he is himself oppressed by the same votes he casts which oppress them. To Alex, there are simply ambitious white men like him—and then there are “women and minorities.” So by the end of the novel, fate has ruled against Alex Wilson, yet he still can’t see that he, too, is part of the majority populace with the rest of us “women and minorities.” But he is, maybe, closer to seeing. Marjorie Pinkwater and her posse of part-timers at the Library of Congress are simply saying out loud to Alex what women across America want to say to the GOP every day.

JF: Tell me about your willingness to guard foreign bridges, and why the act might be helpful to writing novels.

JA: Yes. I served as a “bridge guard” for the Maria Valeria Bridge, connecting the towns of Štúrovo, Slovakia, and Esztergom, Hungary, over the Danube, while finishing Enter the Aardvark. The bridge has an amazing history. It was destroyed in WWI, then rebuilt. The Nazis bombed it again, and it was left that way, obliterated, separating the two towns for over 60 years. When the bridge was finally rebuilt in October of 2001, an artist in residency was established to guard it against the reappearance of fascism through the act of creation. “The mental act of guarding,” the organization says, “is more important than the physical.”

The position is for three months, and you live in an apartment under the bridge on the Slovak side. The days were long and slow and boring, the perfect climate for novel writing, and were punctuated only by the Friday nights when the “V2 Rock Pub” next door played Metallica covers, or some other occasional, strange event. (Once, in the middle of the night, I awoke to a series of loud, crunching sounds, and followed the noise to the bathroom window. I stared out at two moonlit wild horses, eating the tires of a car.)

On my mind throughout that summer were notions of bridging literally, as I crossed the bridge once a day, and metaphorically. I love that you instinctively understood the import of a job like this to novel writing! I found it incredibly healthy to be thinking about bridges while ending the novel. I don’t know if you feel this way, Josh, but for me in fiction, if something appears twice, it becomes true. I often teach as a pairing the brilliant short stories “Brownies” by ZZ Packer and “Sh’khol” by Colum McCann; both introduce an expectation and not only answer but completely subvert that expectation by the end. (Flannery O’Connor was probably our most gifted subverter.) Revising, completing, to me, absolutely means ensuring that the bridge between the beginning and ending is intact, and intractable. I’ll often reread a novel’s opening after completing it. If the novel is intact, the beginning will reveal, obliquely, some sense of the ending. By the end of Enter the Aardvark, Alex Wilson, the “whirling mass of vapors,” remains “unhinged.”

Jessica Anthony and Joshua Ferris
JESSICA ANTHONY is the author of The Convalescent, Chopsticks, and Enter the Aardvark. Her short stories can be found in Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. || JOSHUA FERRIS's first novel, Then We Came to the End, has been translated into 24 languages. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and Best American Voices. Ferris was chosen for the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers in 2010.

For the record no serious critic goes into a job planning to do a takedown. All I heard about Mad Men was that it was great...I sat in my bedroom watching with a good friend of mine and we looked at each other after three episodes and I said, “The love is not happening.” Then it becomes interesting.

What does the rest of the world know about North Korea and the people who live there? In her latest book, How I Became North Korean, Krys Lee takes readers past the border and deep into the lives of defectors. We’re tossed next to Yongju, Jangmi and Danny, three kids who have been forcefully displaced, out of North Korea and into a new world: China.

Life across the river poses many challenges for these three dissimilar characters. China is far from a promised land; the dangers are many, from government informants to thieves, Catholic missionaries, and even other refugees. Yongju, Jangmi, and Danny are part of a vibrant community that struggle to make it in China under heavy discrimination, racism, and political persecution.

The novel, long-listed for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, looks deep into religion and the political agendas of North Korea. But this story is also — and maybe primarily — about family and identity. Aside from the obvious grittiness and tension that goes along with nationhood, nationalism, and crossing the border, Lee writes a human story, with maturity and sovereignty. How I Became North Korean is both delicate and menacing; the book’s details are fascinating, along with its social and political background. However it is, most of all, an overwhelming, emotional story. Lee’s book is shaped by its characters’ fragility, but mostly driven by their courage.

Lee is currently Assistant Professor of creative writing and literature at the Underwood International College of Yonsei University in Seoul. She and I spoke via Skype.

The Millions: With your short story collection Drifting House you gave us a deep look into Korean-American life, and I think you have helped to build the identity of that group as part of migration mythology. Now we have a glimpse of North Korea too. What made you decide to tackle the North Korean refugee issue for this new book?

Krys Lee: I have a lot of North Korean friends; I’ve been friends with defectors for a long time. One of my closest friends in South Korea was an activist, so I became involved with that world too. “Drifting House” (the story) arose from learning about North Korea, about the famine and the kids that starved on the streets. It was an obsession of mine; the things people do to survive. Those morally ambiguous situations interested me a lot. However, “Drifting House” was a story about a specific period of time, and I felt compelled to address more broadly human rights in China and the lives of the refugees that are contemporary today.

TM: Has North Korea become a literary obsession for you, after writing this novel?

KL: For me it’s not about North Korea per se, but about what happens to the people who come out. It’s about people. They’re so vulnerable, so at risk. I felt that those were concerns that needed to be addressed. Many people in South Korea tend to look at North Koreans with a sense of pity and sympathy, but I hope we can look at them with less pity and more a sense of recognition, because of their courage and strength.

TM: What did you know about North Korea during the time you lived outside South Korea?

KL: I knew nothing, frankly, outside of the fact that the Korean War had resulted in the division of the nation into North and South. I had also read books about the war and Korean modern history. But until I moved to South Korea, it was a terrible, sad, but abstract history that affected my family. My understanding and feelings about it changed the person I’ve become. It’s the same way I feel about death — once someone in your immediate family dies, you cross one threshold and become another person. Crossing national borders and living in another country, and experiencing the country’s past and present, changes a person to the same degree.

So much has happened while I’ve lived here. North Korean bombed an inhabited island in South Korea, which sent the two countries to the verge of war, I became friends with North Koreans who had risked their lives to come to South Korea and now don’t know whether their family members are dead or alive. I met activists who worked anonymously and sold their house and used those funds to bring North Koreans from China into a safe third country. Kim Jong-Il passed away and left his young son to rule the nation, who tightened his power (as well as security at the border between China and North Korea) through a typical demagogue’s reign of terror. The dizzying events are many, and my feelings and reactions are complicated and bewildering, even to myself, as they change day to day.

TM: Can you tell us about your activism?

KL: First, I don’t consider myself an activist. I just had close relationships with people in that world, and became a kind of accidental activist. Once I knew details about them it was hard for me to do nothing. I did some volunteering as a teacher, interpreter, translator, and then more. Later I was asked to help set up a safe house at the border area, which led to struggles with the missionary culture and eventually, to helping a North Korean to safety in a third country. Seeing the dangers and fear people go through, it changed me.

TM: You’ve moved around a lot. How did that affect your writing?

KL: I don’t know how it has affected my writing but it did affect me as a person. What affected my writing the most was reading. Books have been a constant in my life. And in another sense I suppose moving has shaped my work, for the fact that I moved between continents has augmented my understanding of everything. Moving broadened my horizons; it made nationhood less important to me, and made even clearer to me that identity is a fluid, precarious thing.

TM: I found it fascinating how the North Korean experience as depicted in How I Became North Korean echoes and relates to the mojado, or Latin American immigrant experience, or to the current refugee crisis. Not just the tragedies and drama, but their behavior and braveness.

KL: I thought about that too as I was finishing writing the book. With my first book I knew I was writing about Koreans and Korean Americans, but again it’s also about people. I write about certain cultures because that’s what I know best, but that doesn’t mean it’s just about Koreans. Koreans are individuals, after all. While I was writing I often thought about how identities are made and formed and imposed on us, and the way the passport determines where you belong, who you are, and your political identity. It’s an identity with benefits and opportunities, but it’s also a geographical jail. Citizenship has political and cultural repercussions, and it’s an idea applicable all around the world, whether you’re North Korean, Latinx, or Syrian.

TM: The novel is family driven. How important is family during your writing process?

KL: I wasn’t aware when I started writing the novel, but for me, family and nation are two ways to frame how to understand a human being. That’s something I do in real life too. People are shaped by either resisting or accepting different aspects of their environment, their personal life, political situation, family, or nation.

TM: Did you interview North Koreans specifically for this book?

KL: Oh no, I couldn’t even think about the book when I was there. I was thinking about people’s lives and not putting them at risk. Once I met a woman who was hiding and we visited her. She was so afraid of meeting us, trembling all over out of fear, but she was desperate to get some help, and some money. But no, I didn’t interrogate them, because I think that’s their private life, and most of them have gone through traumatic experiences. If they choose to share something with me that’s fine, but I was not “looking” for material. My characters are not based on those people; they’re inspired by them and their experiences.

TM: Are you still working with the North Korean community?

KL: I’m friends with a lot of North Koreans, and I’m in an out of the community. I do something for them, if there’s an opportunity for me to be of service, and I’ve maintained many close relationships over the decade. But I also devote time and energy to abused children’s shelters and other areas that matter to me. I think as a human my responsibility is to make one life at a time a little better, if I can. I’ve always wondered what my life would be like if I had become a full-time activist. My life would’ve been very different — I would be so busy that I probably wouldn’t write anymore.

TM: Can we talk about the structure of the book? Why did you decided to have three narrators? Were you always interested in a plurality of voices for it?

KL: If I could have 20 voices in a novel, I would. I don’t experience the world as a single voice, and I’ve never been interested in seeing the world through my single, limited viewpoint. The novel form is an opportunity to imagine the way of thinking and being of other people, as well as, in this case, a way of more fully exploring the very different experiences and personalities of North Korean refugees.

TM: Why didn’t you use the third-person?

KL: Actually, How I Became a North Korean went from first-point of view, to second-person plural, to third, and back to first, and at each stage I learned something about my novel and my characters. That’s one of the reasons it took me nearly five years to finish. I generally trust my instincts in life and in writing. When the point of view finally felt like the right one, I stayed with it.

TM: Did you made a map for the structure of the novel, or did it come naturally? Can you describe the process of putting together those three characters in the story?

KL: I wrote; only when I was stuck did I write ideas, character studies, a basic outline, and whatever else helped me move ahead. But once writing, I rarely refer back to all those notes and outlines, partly because the writing always takes me in another direction, and partly because I’m disorganized and have scraps of notes everywhere. Still, I trust that everything I read and write helped me become closer to the heart of my novel.

And if a book this good was consigned to XLibris, it meant one (or more) of three things. 1) Literary trade publishing was more gravely ill than I’d imagined; 2) My judgment was way off-base (always a possibility), or 3) There was some piece of this story I was still missing.

Television has been elevated to an art form. You can watch 12 straight episodes of Westworld and feel like you’ve done something important. However, reality TV still functions as this lowbrow piece of culture.